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How our brains recall celebrities is mirrored by search engines

The brain is often said to be like a computer. Now it turns out that we store memories of famous people in a similar way to Google.

Our hippocampi – two small, curved brain structures towards the sides of our head – are crucial for memory. Studies have found that people with damage in these areas can no longer make memories of new events.

By studying people who had recording electrodes put into their hippocampi, Rodrigo Quian Quiroga at the University of Leicester, UK, previously found that some neurons in these areas fire only when we see particular celebrities or people we recognise. The experiments involved people trying to memorise pictures of celebrities, and these neurons became known as Jennifer Anniston neurons.

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Some neurons, though, are active for more than one thing: for instance, in one person, the same cell fired in response to pictures of both Luke Skywalker and Yoda from the Star Wars series of films. The few cases of this happening involved two concepts with obvious connections, but until now there have not been enough examples to know whether this is always the case.

To put it to the test, Quian Quiroga’s team showed 100 pictures of celebrities to 49 people. They also searched for the celebrities using Google and Bing to see how closely the internet related all the possible pairs – measured by counting the number of hits in a joint search for both subjects. For example, they searched for “Hillary Clinton” and “Bill Clinton” together, and compared the results to the number of hits for each term on its own.

Sure enough, whenever neurons responded to more than one concept, there was also a strong association between them on the internet.

“This is an exciting study because it takes us deeper into understanding how individual neurons store memories in a core memory centre in the human brain,” says Hugo Spiers at University College London. “Past studies have ignored these long-term associations that build up between objects, people and places in the real world.”